The Unicode(R) Consortium announces that pre-orders of Version 5.0 of the Unicode Standard can be made now through the Unicode Consortium’s website. As a special introductory offer, The Unicode Guide — the handy tri-fold developer’s reference guide — will be included with the Version 5.0 book at a combined price of $40.00 for both. This offer will expire on October 15, 2006.

The new version defines 1,369 new characters, including additional mathematical and linguistic symbols, and characters needed for Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, and for minority language support. Five new scripts are added in 5.0: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform.

The text itself provides better guidance on the handling of combining characters, Unicode strings, variation selectors, line breaking, and segmentation. This latest version is the basis for Unicode security mechanisms, the Unicode collation algorithm, the locale data provided by the Common Locale Data Repository, and support for Unicode in regular expressions. Improved expression of the Unicode encoding model makes it much clearer how to represent Unicode text in UTF-8 and other encoding forms. Character properties have been systematized and greatly extended to help with Unicode text processing. This new version is a major update which supersedes and obsoletes all previous versions of the standard.

Unicode is required by modern standards as XML and is widely supported in computer systems. Windows Vista runs on Unicode 5.0 and Google, Yahoo!, and ICU all have plans to upgrade to it.

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